So Bayern Munich once again scraped through to win the Meisterschaft, with Borussia Dortmund a close second, only 19 points adrift. Schalke, who finished third, and Bayer Leverkusen (4th) switched places from 2012-13, but the top four were the only constants in comparison with the previous campaign.

For all the fashionable laments about a lack of competitiveness, boredom or even the death of the league, this was, as ever, a pleasingly erratic “everything goes” Bundesliga season, with 43,500 people on average going to each of the 306 games, 967 balls going into the net or close enough (the highest return since 1987), three clubs (Hamburg, Stuttgart, Nürnberg) going for a hat-trick of different managers, Europa League contestants (Freiburg, Frankfurt, Stuttgart) almost going down, Augsburg (Augsburg!) going close to international football and Hamburger SV going from bad to unfathomably bad to so beyond-a-joke-bad that they somehow even bungled relegation.

The self-styled “Bundesliga dino” survived on a mere 27 points, via two draws with Greuther Fürth in the play-offs. No one should have been worse but 1. FC Nürnberg (26 points) made it a record eighth relegation and the hard-fighting but low-scoring Eintracht Braunschweig (25 points) went straight down after their first season in the top flight since 1984-85.

Funnily enough, Hoffenheim got plenty of attention too. Their mascot Hoffi stumbled and lost its head, the goals kept flying at Tischfußball rates (142 in 34 games) and their groundsman provided the main talking point of the entire year. Older readers of this column will undoubtedly remember that history was written in Sinsheim, the locale of TSG’s stadium, before: the Prussian king Frederick the Great was caught in the town during his attempted flight to England with his favourite page, Keith, in 1730. But something bigger happened during the game against Leverkusen in October. Stefan Kiessling’s header hit the side netting. The ball found a hole in the net, however, and ended up inside a goal. While Kiessling turned around in disappointment, the referee, Dr Felix Brych, pointed to the halfway line. Hoffenheim players showing him the faulty equipment soon afterwards didn’t change the official’s mind.

This farce went down in the annals of German football as the ghostliest ghost goal ever – “Phantom-Tor” is the technical term – but hopes that this incident might push the league over the line, towards goal technology, were dashed six months later. Only 12 out of the 36 professional clubs agreed that knowing whether the ball was in or out would be worth a few hundred thousand euros of their money. Dortmund were one of the clubs in favour of embracing the 21st century, incidentally, but that was scant consolation when they found themselves on the wrong end of another wrong goalline decision in their 2-0 DFB Cup final defeat to Bayern.

Speaking of the double winners, theirs was another season of records at Sun Ra levels: they were both plentiful and outlandish. The Bavarian side became the first Märzmeister (March champions) in Bundesliga history, won 19 games in a row and did not lose for 53 matches. “The Bundesliga is like everyday pizza or Hamburger,” Pep Guardiola opined, and it was hard to argue with the Catalan’s taste buds. His Bayern team took possession football to new extremes and rendered domestic contests even more one-sided than before. Until Augsburg managed to beat the heavily rotated champions-elect in early April, everyone had proved little more than a quick, comforting bite. Powered by the Pep-Man, Bayern gobbled up points for fun and the opposition mostly gave up the ghost well before the first 200 balls had been passed by the new midfield fulcrum, Philipp Lahm.

The 4-0 win at Schalke 04 in September proved the high-point in terms of performance – for 70 minutes Bayern were flawless. Unfortunately, they could not quite maintain those levels of intensity in the second half of the season. The club – if perhaps not the team – were in upheaval when the club patriarch Uli Hoeness, the architect of Bayern’s empire, was convicted of tax evasion to the tune of €27m and sentenced to three years and six months in prison. Losing Thiago to injury also had a profound impact. The Spaniard’s incisive passes were sadly missed against defensively solid teams in the Champions League.

A domestic double as well as the Club World Cup and the European Super Cup were a more than an acceptable return for Guardiola’s first season in charge but the disappointment of the semi-final defeat by Real Madrid made the team’s tactical progress seem intermittent and, after his “most difficult season” as a coach, the 43-year-old was back where he started in July: fighting against doubts that he was diminishing Jupp Heynckes’s treble winners. (In the summer, Franck Ribéry had complained of having to frequent “strange channels”, like a mid-noughties James Richardson.)

It’s a bit of a mystery why Guardiola should have taken the stylistic criticism of Franz Beckenbauer so seriously – no one else does in Munich – and complaints about a dressing room mole tipping off Bild made him look thin-skinned, too. His biggest problem, however, was simply one of timing. Bayern thought he would take them to the promised land of a fifth European Cup by making the necessary adjustments but he arrived at a team that had just won everything and was thus reluctant to fully buy into his ideas. Some sections of the media were more hostile still. Süddeutsche Zeitung made the point that Guardiola’s real work, the one he was hired for, will only start next season. “The rebuilding in Munich begins now,” wrote the broadsheet.

Jürgen Klopp’s job, by contrast, appears a little less daunting. The 46-year-old nearly took a leaf out of Luis Suárez’s cookbook to maul a fourth official in a Champions League game, and he seemed to inhabit a house with faulty electric wiring (“When the washing machine breaks down, the dryer goes dead the next day, and the TV won’t work either,” he said in reference to some rotten luck with injuries) but in the end, Dortmund achieved their goals with relative ease and the imminent, inevitable breakup of the side that has been reported since 2011 will have to wait for yet another season. Their leading goalscorer, Robert Lewandowski, proved a model pro in his last season before defecting to the south, and inexplicably neither Klopp nor any of the other key figures at the Black and Yellows were tempted to switch the Signal Iduna Park for the best league/club/brand in the world. We can but hope that at least one or two will stick around for next season. Do check back with us again in three months. In the meantime, here are the Honigsteins for 2014.

Team of the season

Augsburg. In only their third season in the top flight, the Markus Weinzierl-coached crew of journeymen and late developers played with the kind of cohesion and tempo you would have expected from much bigger clubs. Eighth place was their reward.

Best player

3 Thiago Alcântara “Thiago or nothing,” Guardiola insisted. There was no obvious space in Bayern’s central midfield for the former Barcelona squad member but the 23-year-old quickly found one anyway. The Spaniard’s passing range and ability to beat opponents in tight spaces made the Reds an even more daunting prospect. The fact that they started losing games once he got injured in April was probably not a coincidence.

2 Philipp Lahm “A football robot,” was how Thomas Tuchel called the Bayern and Germany captain after his move into midfield. Lahm completed 134 out of 134 passes v Hertha, excelled in four different positions against Mainz and shone throughout.

1 Marco Reus 16 goals and 14 assists – in 28 games. A further five in nine Champions League games. Reus’s numbers were up on last year’s tally, and more important, the 25-year-old played with such devastating effectiveness that ensured a satisfying end to Dortmund’s campaign. Easily the best of all the very good young German players.

Nayim-from-the-halfway-line award

Silver Bullet Trophy (for complying within 20 seconds)

Best animal-based pun

“We are not the underdog, we are the lapdog,” said Thorsten Lieberknecht ahead of the defeat against Bayern.

Best pro

“You can wake him in the middle of the night and he’ll start defending immediately”. Thomas Tuchel on the centre-back Niko Bungert

Best opening line

“Mr Kiessling, now you have finally had an invitation from the German FA,” the German FA sports tribunal’s chairman, Hans E Lorenz, joked as Joachim Löw’s not-quite-favourite striker was questioned about his ghost goal.

Freudian keyboard slip of the year

“It’s all about keeping the cash,” Felix Magath wrote in his Hamburger SV manifesto/failed job application on Facebook. He had meant to write “it’s all about keeping the class”, as in staying in the first division.

Best indignation

“It’s a stupid, disrespectful question,” sneered the Stuttgart sporting director, Fredi Bobic, when a reporter asked him about the future of his manager, “VfB have parted company with head coach Bruno Labbadia with immediate effect,” the club announced on Twitter the next morning.

Philipp Lahm versatility prize

In a series of thoroughly romantic Valentine’s Day photos, Robert Lewandowski proved that he’s happy to be employed in almost any position.

Uli Hoeness golden binoculars

“We are closer to the top teams than I thought” – Bert van Marwijk, HSV coach No2, gets its ever so slightly wrong.

Most realistic self-appraisal

“Fuck me, I don’t look good at all here,” the SC Freiburg keeper Oliver Baumann admitted to reporters after his three awful blunders in the defeat to Hamburg.

Best explanation

“There were these moments when you feel: you are a small piss club. You are a small piss club that doesn’t get any recognition from referees. And the first deflected fuck ball goes in.” It’s all yellow for Braunschweig’s Thorsten Lieberknecht.

Worst haircut

“Not really a haircut, more of a memorial to the unknown hairdresser who died half-way through the job,” said the inimitable Arnd Zeigler about this shocker from Javier Pinola.

Best nickname

The Braunschweig defender Ermin Bicakcic is called “Eisen-Ermin” (iron Ermin), “because he can put a dent into railway tracks with his head,” the coach Thorsten Lieberknecht explained.

Cruellest nickname

Hamburg supporters referred to their captain Heiko Westermann as “HW4”. The moniker followed the “CR7” template but the comparison wasn’t all that flattering.

Robbie Keane award for fulfilling your boyhood dream

“Dortmund are my favourite club, I watch all of their games,” Kevin-Prince Boateng told spox.com in the summer. A couple of weeks later, he signed for arch rivals Schalke 04.

Most pressing nether-regions complaint

“This game hurts my balls,” said the Hoffenheim coach Markus Gisdol after his team’s 4-4 draw with Bremen, “if we had scored seven, they would have scored seven, too, today.”

Best scurrilous rumour

“Ilkay Gündogan had treatment in a military hospital on the Crimea,” Sport1 reported, to much amusement, at the height of the Ukraine crisis. It all sounded far too much like a James Bond opening scene to be true but strangely enough, the story was confirmed as 100% genuine a month later.

Harley Street award for services to stool testing

“Bayern players go to the toilet, too. And what’s coming out is the same as ours,” claimed the Nürnberg coach Gertjan Verbeek. The difference in, ahem, end product was quite remarkable, however.

Donald Rumsfeld medal for applied logic

“We know we have certainty of uncertainty,” said the Schalke sporting director Horst Heldt.

Psychologist of the year

“It’s like little children. You tell them not to run into a tree, they will run into a tree,” Thorsten Fink said of his HSV players.

Worst prediction

Let’s face it, we all get things wrong, all the time. Still, you would have expected an authority such as Lothar Matthäus (four ex-Mrs Matthäus, and counting) to get the basics right. “His wife is looking for a house for him in London, he’s going to Arsenal,” the German record international said of Josip Drmic. Arsenal turned out to be Bayer Leverkusen, London will be Cologne or Düsseldorf and Drmic isn’t actually married.

Hooligan of the year

Kevin Großkreutz played well enough on the pitch, but away from the green grass, Mr Dortmund’s aim was a little off. The Germany international urinated in a Berlin hotel lobby after the cup final defeat and allegedly threw a kebab into the face of a heckler in Cologne. “The sauce burnt like hell in my eyes,” the alleged victim complained to police. Team-mate Julian Schieber, the key witness for the defence, insisted, however, that there had not been an assault by way of greasy street food. “Kevin threw the kebab to the floor,” Schieber told Bild.

Worst marketing campaign

“Creatives” from Braunschweig and Hannover came up with this insufferable monstrosity, a “let’s all get along” video ahead of the Lower Saxony derby.

Second worst marketing campaign

Nürnberg ultras came up with the dubious line of “I don’t regret this love,” and the club adopted it for the second half of the season. Cue: regret all around.

Controversy of the season

4. Gertjan Verbeek refused to share the podium with the Freiburg coach, Christian Streich. No one ever worked out why.

3. Matthias Sammer v Dortmund and the rest of the league. Bayern’s sporting director accused the opposition of “not doing everything in training”. Klopp took grave offence (“Sammer should thank God every day that Bayern took him”) but he wasn’t the intended target. Sammer wasn’t wrong, too, generally speaking but some truths are better left unspoken or should at least be delivered in more diplomatic fashion.

1. Guardiola v Veh and Heldt. “It’s not OK … to throw games away,” said Eintracht Frankfurt’s Armin Veh after Bayern’s heavy-rotation defeat at Augsburg, their first of the season. It was not “good form to do things that make it problematic for others”, added Schalke’s Horst Heldt. All very reasonable, if a tad disingenuous, perhaps. Veh had of course himself rested two players before his side’s 5-0 capitulation in Munich because he wanted to keep them fresh for the match versus Braunschweig. And Heldt vehemently defended a similar rotation policy three years ago, when Ralf Rangnick rested half the Schalke 04 team in the 3-1 defeat by (relegation strugglers) Kaiserslautern before the Champions League semi-final against Manchester United.

Most patronising match analysis

“Congratulations to Mainz. It was exactly what we needed – a truly aggressive opponent that fully challenged us,” said Matthias Sammer.

Best Sammerism

“It’s good when it’s not good, for once”.

Exaggeration of the season

“A catastrophe, truly abysmal. This was the worst thing I have ever seen,” Jens Keller opined about his team’s first-half showing in the 5-1 defeat v Bayern. Patently untrue.

And finally…

“The people who jeered were born stupid and won’t die intelligent,” said the Gladbach coach, Lucien Favre, after some discontent from their own fans. A nice variation on the “they have a right to voice their opinion” line.